Elaine Nekritz, a proponent of legislative thievery once again

"…There are no absolutes in the state constitution or the U.S. Constitution," Elaine Nekritz said. "The state constitution says that the state has the primary responsibility for financing the system of public education, but the Illinois Supreme Court ruled it doesn't… No law is absolute, and there are any number of cases that make this clear," Nekritz said. "I believe the Illinois Supreme Court will ultimately realize this one area is no different than any other constitutional provision…" (Chicago Tribune, Feb. 4, 2015). 

Commentary (reprise):

I won’t bother to comment on Nekritz’s faulty analogies from the rest of the Tribune article. We have often read commentaries that have used misleading analogies and other deliberate misinformation to either argue fallaciously or foment envy and anger for public employees who have earned constitutionally-guaranteed pension benefit rights. We know there are several antedated court cases that have upheld the Illinois State Constitution.

 

I have stated often that to challenge the “Pension Clause” is to defy common understanding of its legal and moral principles and to believe that every word in the State and U.S. Constitutions might also be interpreted into an infinite, fabricated regression. 

Most people know the “Pension Clause” is a valid agreement because it is understood to be a contractual right and guarantee that public employees have earned. Most people also know Illinois legislators are not dealing with a threat to the “public’s safety, health, and morals as well as peace, well-being and order of the state”; nor are they dealing with an economic emergency of such magnitude that they are compelled to invoke powers to protect the state's citizens and, thus, serve a reasonable public purpose or need. Consider the plethora of corporate welfare given out in Illinois, the state's unfair flat tax, the decades of underfunding the pension systems, and the flawed "Pension Ramp."

Most people know pension reform is an egregious attack on public employees’ rights to a constitutionally-guaranteed, earned compensation. An unconscionable constitutional challenge of those rights and earned benefits generates a serious threat to their secure sense of worth as citizens and creates the unfair possibility for an economic disadvantage for a particular group of people and their families. This can never be legally or morally justified.

"The power of changing the relative situation of debtor and creditor, of interfering with contracts, a power which comes home to every man, touches the interest of all, and controls the conduct of every individual in those things which he supposes to be proper for his own exclusive management, had been used to such an excess by the state legislatures, as to break in upon the ordinary intercourse of society, and destroy all confidence between man and man.

“This mischief had become so great, so alarming, as not only to impair commercial intercourse and threaten the existence of credit, but to sap the morals of the people and destroy the sanctity of private faith. To guard against the continuance of the evil was an object of deep interest with all the truly wise, as well as the virtuous, of this great community, and was one of the important benefits expected from a reform of the government” (Chief Justice Marshall).

What Illinois citizens can accurately predict about future contracts with state legislators, like Nekritz, who believe they have the “power to interfere with the obligations of contracts [that are] specifically denied to the states [in Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution]” is that if Illinois legislators “can declare an emergency to exist and abrogate one provision of [both State and U.S. Constitutions]…, ‘this decision serves notice upon [every citizen of Illinois], who heretofore had trusted in the constitutions for protection and believed in the sanctity of a contract, that the constitutions are no longer a guarantee nor security against the abrogation of a proper and legal contract’” (Fliter, John A. and Derek S. Hoff. Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, the Contract Clause, and the Great Depression).